Chapter 4 ~ Page 54
Acquiring a replacement wasn't as easy. What we ended up with acquired the name, "Hungry," as a healthy appetite was this horse's most outstanding feature. An Appaloosa, he was blemished by an osselet, a sort of a bony growth on the leg, that at any time could act up and lame him permanently.
I gambled $83.50 by buying Hungry at an auction. This has to be the riskiest of all ways to acquire horseflesh, but as time was to prove, once again, we were dumb lucky.
BJ and I thumbed a ride 20 miles to the sale. Returning the 20 miles "home," with one horse, whose unshod feet were in such poor shape that he wasn't ridable, hitchhiking just wasn't possible.
It was late in the evening when we started walking through Belmont and Banning, suburbs of suburban Los Angeles. The sight of us, in trail garb, leading our purchase down a city sidewalk through a crowd just let out of a movie theater, was good for a laugh all around.
It was sometime past midnight when the horse chose his own name. Taking a short-cut through pasture land, the poor thing went wild with "green grass fever," and would just about yank the lead rope out of my hand when he stopped to eat.
As the ground was softer here, I put BJ up on Hungry's back to force him to move along. This worked very well for all of five minutes. My son laid down on the job and went right to sleep.
The first light of morning was silhouetting the mountains when we arrived to a cold fire and leftover dinner—both of us riding. In the darkness before dawn I had almost stepped on a rattler, disproving an old tale that they don't come out at night. The frightening thing was that I couldn't see him, and didn't know which way to jump, except up.
Actually, though, it was better to have made that hike through the night, instead of the day. By the time the sun was fully up, and I was shoeing Hungry, it became necessary, at least three times an hour, to jump into the fast flowing ice water creek that roared out of the mountains past our camp before disappearing, not too much further on, into the sand.
Upstream the action of the flow was powerful enough to have carved out bathtubs with built in showers. After One of these reprieves from the heat, there was no need to towel off, for laying on a hot boulder five minutes did the job.
I gambled $83.50 by buying Hungry at an auction. This has to be the riskiest of all ways to acquire horseflesh, but as time was to prove, once again, we were dumb lucky.
BJ and I thumbed a ride 20 miles to the sale. Returning the 20 miles "home," with one horse, whose unshod feet were in such poor shape that he wasn't ridable, hitchhiking just wasn't possible.
It was late in the evening when we started walking through Belmont and Banning, suburbs of suburban Los Angeles. The sight of us, in trail garb, leading our purchase down a city sidewalk through a crowd just let out of a movie theater, was good for a laugh all around.
It was sometime past midnight when the horse chose his own name. Taking a short-cut through pasture land, the poor thing went wild with "green grass fever," and would just about yank the lead rope out of my hand when he stopped to eat.
As the ground was softer here, I put BJ up on Hungry's back to force him to move along. This worked very well for all of five minutes. My son laid down on the job and went right to sleep.
The first light of morning was silhouetting the mountains when we arrived to a cold fire and leftover dinner—both of us riding. In the darkness before dawn I had almost stepped on a rattler, disproving an old tale that they don't come out at night. The frightening thing was that I couldn't see him, and didn't know which way to jump, except up.
Actually, though, it was better to have made that hike through the night, instead of the day. By the time the sun was fully up, and I was shoeing Hungry, it became necessary, at least three times an hour, to jump into the fast flowing ice water creek that roared out of the mountains past our camp before disappearing, not too much further on, into the sand.
Upstream the action of the flow was powerful enough to have carved out bathtubs with built in showers. After One of these reprieves from the heat, there was no need to towel off, for laying on a hot boulder five minutes did the job.
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Text and Photographs © Barry Murray 1971-2007 Mac&Murray Multimedia